


Sweet Dreams

by saiikavon



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 21:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12240951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiikavon/pseuds/saiikavon
Summary: Request prompt: Shakarian with nightmares/cuddles.How the Shepard/Vakarian relationship built over time.





	Sweet Dreams

Turians didn’t really dream, not in the way that Humans did. There were patterns of sounds and smells that triggered memories, things that lingered when they woke even when the patterns were long faded. Far away from home, working a thankless, burdensome job, Garrus often woke with the sound of his sister’s singing echoing in his ears. He smelled the smoky desert wind of home and the dry, sun-warmed soil.

His first sting of failure came with his father’s disapproving hiss, and the smug laughter of a twisted Salarian. _“I’m sure I’ll see you again, officer.”_ The title was a badge of shame in that moment; and while C-Sec had never been his first choice, at that moment it became a symbol of failure. Nothing but red tape and regulation, a way for the privileged to stroke their own egos, punishing petty criminals and sitting by while the real crimes went unpunished. His skin itched and he woke from bitter sleep with that laughter still in his head. He was sure, at the time, that losing Dr. Saleon was his greatest failure. How naïve.

Meeting Shepard changed his perspective in a lot of ways. He idolized her at first, saw her as the symbol of everything he ever wanted for himself before he even thought to figure out who she was. He saw a Spectre, an independent agent, someone who didn’t have bend to unnecessary protocol. He chose to follow that image, mostly to satisfy his own petty frustrations, and wound up with something he actually needed. She was his leader. She was his friend. She reminded him why it was important to have rules, to consider how to do a job _right_ before you get it done. It wasn’t just about the end result, but about the people you impacted along the way.

It was after their last face-off with Dr. Saleon, when his head was still swimming with questions, that she first asked him why he’d taken the Salarian’s crimes so personally. He admitted that while some part of him had thought about the people that had been hurt, that would continue to be hurt, he’d made it less and less about that as time went on. He’d had fantasies of heroism that were shattered the moment he had to let Saleon go.

“I should have smelled blood in my dreams,” he said. “I shouldn’t have thought twice about what he said to me back then.”

Shepard was silent for a long moment, considering, but not judging. He would have expected judgment from his father; disappointment, even. In Shepard’s gaze, there was only sympathy, and comradery. Like she understood.

“I always saw Akuze as a failure,” she admitted.

“What?” Garrus’ mandibles twitched. “You survived.”

“I survived. The rest of my unit didn’t.” She shrugged. “I always wished I could have done more. Saved at least one more person. At the time, all I could do was survive. I thought about the rest of my unit for years, saw their faces in my dreams.”

Garrus tilted his head in a gesture of confusion. “Saw their faces?”

She looked at him with a tight smile. “Human dreams have pictures, like…like movies in our heads. They don’t always make sense. And they’re not always pleasant.”

_Not always pleasant._ Garrus thought on the bitter memories his dreams had recently left him, the anger he felt when he woke. He hummed in agreement.

“That part, I think, is something that Turians and Humans have in common.”

Their friendship truly blossomed after that conversation. He told her more about his home, his family; particularly his sister and mother, whom he’d shared the closest bond with. He tried to replicate his sister’s songs, but they didn’t sound right coming from his throat, and the universal translator threw the tone off completely. Still, Shepard seemed to appreciate it. Though she told him not to be too flattered by her praise; her entire family evidently had a legacy of being completely tone-deaf.

“I can’t carry a tune or keep rhythm to save my life,” she said with a laugh. The first time Garrus had ever seen her expression so…upturned, and glowing. Did Human faces typically shine like that? He couldn’t recall ever seeing a face quite like hers before, which was strange. Usually, Humans all tended to look the same to him.

He believed her about the dancing, though. He’d seen her dance. It wasn’t pretty.

He thought of pictures in dreams only a handful of times while he was still on the Normandy. He sometimes wondered if it would be better or worse, seeing faces at night, of people who weren’t there. Reliving memories while awake seemed bad enough, and one could turn those off, choosing to push them aside to focus on something else. In dreams, things came to you unbidden, and you had no way of distracting yourself. Garrus never could rid himself of Saleon’s laugh, not until the sick Salarian was shot down right in front of him. What would it have been like to see his face, twisted in a sneer, over and over again in the night? Would it have driven him mad? Would it only have made him want to hunt the bastard down even more?

He wondered, but then quickly forgot when it came time to share a drink with the Normandy’s crew, or when he and Shepard had a moment alone to talk about…anything. Favorite weapons, hobbies, nastiest scars they’d ever gotten; they could talk about pretty much anything. When they got into more serious topics, after a time, it seemed as natural as breathing.

Things changed after the news of Shepard’s death. And it was that—news. Not long after defeating Saren and destroying Sovereign, Shepard had convinced Garrus to give C-Sec another try. He’d left with a mutual salute and a promise to see each other again, whenever they could. He hadn’t been there when the Normandy was blasted, hadn’t had the chance to save her, or go down with her, or even just…to say goodbye. That haunted him just as much as being there had haunted Liara. Garrus saw it in her face every time they talked; that far-off, shattered gaze that said she’d watched her best friend slowly suffocate in the vacuum of space.

He’d still have traded places with her in a heartbeat.

He still hated C-Sec and everything that came with it. Shepard had tried to tell him to make it work for him, to change the system if he still found he didn’t like it, and to remember what it was all about: helping people, in the best way that he could. He tried. But the only people he found that had the power to change the system were the kinds of people who’d already corrupted it in the first place. When things changed, it was never for the better. Only Shepard could have convinced Garrus to stay on after he realized that…and she was gone.

He started thinking about dreams again. He spent nights lying awake, trying to recall her face—not just the face they showed in holos and old vids, but _her_ face, the face of the woman who couldn’t dance, who loved driving fast off-road, and who would eat sushi for breakfast if she could. He tried to remember her smile. He recalled her voice in his dreams, but he couldn’t see her. He wondered if it would be easier if he dreamed like Humans did. He wouldn’t allow himself to think differently, no matter what happened.

Perhaps that’s why, even after Sidonis—after losing his squad, the only friends he’d had after Shepard’s death—he tried to picture them, too, lying awake at night. He recalled Shepard telling him about her unit on Akuze, how she saw them in her dreams. He wondered how that compared to smelling blood every night in his own dreams, to hearing Sidonis’ lies over and over again. _“I’ve got everything handled here, Garrus, you go. We’ll be fine here.”_ He heard the laughter of the others, teasing him. _“Go on, you big mother hen.”_

He heard that last one quite a lot. The last words he ever heard from one of his friends—his real friends. The words replayed over and over again, whenever he managed to sleep. He kept trying to recall their faces, and in his vengeance-driven moments, he recalled their final expressions in death. He burned the scene into his mind. He convinced himself that he needed it to drive him on if he ever wanted to hunt Sidonis down and make him pay for what he did. More than that, he never wanted to forget them. He was already afraid of forgetting Shepard.

He disappeared after Sidonis’ betrayal. For the most part, Archangel became a shadow, a mystery in the dark, and a continued source of frustration for Omega’s prominent gangs. Liara seemed just about the only person able to find him (she’d been scarily good at that, lately, but also helpful in that regard—she helped him cover his tracks in places that he couldn’t handle himself, and found him targets that were otherwise determined to escape his notice).

There was only so much trouble he could cause by himself, though, and forming a second team was far more difficult than creating the first—and the first team had been formed over a long time to begin with. Sooner or later, he knew he would be cornered. He could only hope, when that time came, that he would take a good chunk of his attackers down with him—and that he could see Shepard again on the other side.

When that time did come, however, he could only be stunned by his own dumb luck that it was _Shepard_ who came to help him. Seeing her face again, it was like the two years since her death had never passed. It was like he’d never left the Normandy at all when she fought at his back, covering him without a hitch, without hesitation, just like old times. Perhaps even better, since their skills had improved so much—but that was the only thing to remind him that anything had changed at all, at least in the moment (later he would notice her scars, the shifty way she took in her surroundings, how she’d stop and take a few deep breaths before she stepped onto a shuttle). He could have convinced himself it was all a dream, or that he had truly died and gotten his wish, if he hadn’t had half his face blown off in that same battle. The pain was enough to remind him that he was awake, at least for the scant minutes he was able to remain conscious.

After all the gunfire and pain and shouts, he saw her hovering over him, in perfect focus when everything else around him was a blur.

His memory was fuzzy afterwards, but in what he thought were going to be his final moments, he found himself staring up at her and thinking, _I think I could love this woman._

***

Jane had probably paced the entire length of the briefing room by the time she heard any news of Garrus. Both Mordin and Dr. Chakwas had already kicked her out of the med bay twice, both times citing her as a distraction. She made herself keep it together, tried to get a grip on her racing thoughts before she wound up ruining the entire operation.

Garrus would be fine, she told herself. If she could come back after suffocating in space and probably being burnt to a crisp upon reentry into whatever atmosphere she happened to float past, then Garrus could come back from this. And he did. He walked through that door, one side of his face a mangled mass of scar tissue, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

This was the first time she really registered how much he’d changed. When she thought back to the firefight on Omega, she recognized a refinement to the way he lined up a shot, a precision he’d lacked in the past. He was a rebel to his core, and that would likely never change, but she saw something in the way he carried himself, now. He’d been through as much as she had, seen things he shouldn’t have had to, and come out stronger but scarred; still disillusioned as he had ever been about the ugliness in the world, but no longer intimidated by the weight of it.

Above all, though, he was still her friend. That alone allowed her to breathe freely in a way that she hadn’t since she was revived. When he joked with her, talked about things they’d talked about before their lives tore them to pieces, she felt a little less like she was going to float apart in the nothingness of space all over again.

Her feelings didn’t come from nowhere, so this wasn’t how it started. This was just the first thing that got her thinking of how it had been brewing for a long time. Two years being dead and now she had something stable, familiar; someone she could trust and who trusted her, even aboard a Cerberus vessel and taking orders from a man neither of them had ever hoped to meet—unless it had been to pull the trigger against his temple, that is. Before Tali came aboard, Garrus was one of only three people on the ship that she knew, and the only one she trusted implicitly to have her back on the field. The others grew on her, eventually. But before that, it was just Garrus.

Nights were harder, aboard the SR-2. As generous as it was of Cerberus to provide her with her own fancy quarters, it was…difficult to be so far away from the rest of the crew. She felt isolated, cramped, but also too exposed. She couldn’t look too long at the trash chute without feeling like it was about to suck her up along with the garbage and blast her out into the cold and dark again. She came up to her quarters to shower and feed her fish and not much else. Sleep, when she could grab it, rarely wound up being in the bed. When she slept in the bed, she was more likely to have nightmares of dying, and to wake up, for a moment, feeling like she was strapped down to that Cerberus medical table again.

Sometimes it got too hard to breathe, and that was when she sought Garrus out the most. Talking to him about mundane things helped her feel almost normal, helped her keep her wits about her when she really needed it. After the first few talks, she learned that she did the same for him, and that he had his own reasons for having a hard time falling asleep at night.

“I smell blood when I sleep,” he told her. “Doesn’t quite hold a candle to reliving memories of my own death, but…it keeps me up, just the same.”

He talked a bit about his former squad, after some prompting (but no pushing; Jane knew a hard topic when she heard one). He had stories about some of their missions, some that reminded them both of the days when they were hunting down Saren. Others just showed her the regret darkening Garrus’ features all the more prominently, and the undercurrent of anger for something he still wasn’t quite sharing. She could wait. It didn’t stop her from wondering in the meantime, or worrying. Garrus had always held certain things closer than perhaps he should have.

They helped each other through the long nights, when the nightmares became too much. Garrus talked more and more about his squad, and she, when she could stomach it, talked about dying. How it was more the memory of it that haunted her than anything else, the fact that it was a _memory_ and not her last moments, as they should have been. Parts of her were angry that Cerberus had decided to piece her back together. Now she had to pick up where she left off and do what she knew was right, instead of rest in eternity. She didn’t know whether she would have wanted to come back, because it was never her choice.

“Still,” she admitted, “if I’m going to go down again, next time I’d rather not do it alone. Silver lining, I guess.”

Garrus chuckled, his mandibles vibrating against his face. “You always were good at looking on the bright side. I never found the talent for it.”

Jane grinned right back, raising her drink in a gesture of comradery. “Stick with me, Garrus, and you’ll be seeing rainbows and kittens everywhere before you know it.”

This prompted a very strange, but hilarious discussion about cute, fuzzy animals all across the galaxy—“You’re telling me you kept a tiny, fuzzy lizard as a pet when you were a kid, Garrus?”—and the nightmares were easier to stave off that night. They would never go away completely, she knew that…but at least Garrus was there to help.

She worried about him, too, though, and the things that he still kept locked away. She could only watch, and wait, until he was ready to let her see. Something about all of this seemed familiar—she saw the regret written all over him, and the anger that steadily dampened the guilt of losing people, especially people he cared about.

Learning about Sidonis was somehow not a surprise, but it was an important piece of the puzzle that was Garrus, nevertheless. She was reminded of Dr. Saleon, and how personally Garrus had taken everything surrounding him. This made sense, but it was different. Saleon was a target. Sidonis was a friend.

Despite everything, Jane couldn’t let Garrus kill Sidonis. At the risk of betraying his trust, she stopped Garrus from pulling the trigger.

He was silent for a while. She was prepared, when they returned to the Normandy, to give him time and distance. She was prepared for his disappointment, his anger. She received neither. As always, she had his trust, evident in the laugh he gave her when they docked.

“Just like before, Shepard,” he said. “I should have guessed you’d never let me do it.”

He turned to her, then, and something passed between them that made her breath catch in her chest. He reached out and his fingers brushed her cheek.

“I thought I’d never forget how you helped me back then, when we first met,” he continued, voice soft. “But I let my anger cloud me, again.”

“It was different this time,” she said. “This was about your team, your friends. You can’t blame yourself from taking that to heart.”

Garrus’ mandibles twitched in what Jane took as his version of a smile. His eyes gleamed with mirth. “Just let me thank you, Shepard. You gave me what I needed, again, without me ever knowing I needed it.” He withdrew his hand. “Grab a drink later?”

She smiled back. “You know it.”

It wasn’t that things changed between them, after that. It was just that the dust had settled, the sky had opened up, and they could see what it was that had been blossoming for a while. The time they spent together, the reasons for each moment stayed the same, but the looks they gave each other, the laughs they shared were loaded with…more. Their eyes would meet and hold each other for ages, sometimes without them even noticing (the crew noticed, though—with how many times it happened, it was hard for them not to).

Taking that final step wasn’t hard; at least, making the choice wasn’t. Crossing the line between close friends and lovers didn’t come without some missteps, some awkwardness. But all of it was so, so welcome amidst everything else they were fighting against. The night they set their course for the Collector base, they spent at least an hour just holding onto each other, foreheads pressed together, breathing in time with each other. They shared their first kisses that night, and much more, and every night until reaching the base they spent in each other’s arms.

Jane hadn’t felt so safe and comfortable in her bed until Garrus lay in it with her.

***

_Everything was cold. From a distance, she could still see the fires on the Normandy raging, but she no longer felt the heat. Her limbs had gone numb, and no longer moved, no matter how hard she tried to move them. The hiss of her oxygen tank had died off, too, leaving her dizzy, with empty lungs and a feeling like a rope tightening around her chest._

_The seconds ticked by, and she could do nothing. She just floated, heavy and useless, her life leeching out of her bit by bit. She might have used her last breaths to scream, to try and radio for help, but she couldn’t even do that._

Jane woke gasping for breath, body shaking not just from fear, but as though reminding her that she could still move. Her hands moved through her hair, twitching and flexing. She took in the beat of her own heart, and the warmth of the body next to her. The hands that rubbed her back, the arms that held her closer, reminding her of where she was.

Garrus’ voice rumbled from the dark. “You’re with me. You’re right here. You’re safe.”

Jane took a few stabilizing breaths, and then her hands sought out his, lacing through them in comfort. One would think they’d make a strange fit, three fingers to five, but like everything else, they made it work. They settled next to each other so naturally now, bodies lined up perfectly, touches in all the right places. Sometimes Jane traced the jagged lines of Garrus’ scars, learning all his features by heart and taking comfort in the reminder of how much they’d survived together.

“Lost in space again?” he asked, his way of asking about her nightmare. It seemed an almost light-hearted way of talking about such a dream, but it was better than asking if she was dreaming about dying. She preferred his wording, as well as his continued touches warming her skin.

She sighed and pressed her face into his neck. Her head was throbbing, as it often did after one of those nightmares. “The worst part of it,” she said. “I can take the explosion. It’s the…helplessness after that’s hard. The not being able to move.”

“I understand what you mean.” Garrus moved a hand up, fingers running through her sweat-dampened hair. “Not that I can imagine what’s it like to be…blown out into space, but…” He seemed to hesitate, his hands stilling for a moment. Confused, she pulled back to look up at him.

“Garrus?”

“When I first heard that you had…died,” he began, his hands resuming their petting, “I felt something like that. Helplessness. I wished I had been there to do something, even if it was just to go down with you.” He paused, dipping his head just slightly to nuzzle against the top of her head in something close to a kiss. “I guess everything worked out in the end, though. I’m here with you, and we get to pay the Collectors back for blowing everything up in the first place. Silver lining.”

Jane smiled, laughing tiredly. “What did I tell you? Rainbows and kittens.”

Garrus laughed, too. “Rainbows and kittens.” He leaned down to nuzzle her again, and she could feel his heartbeat slow. “Ready to try and sleep again?”

“Might as well,” Jane said. She sighed and shuffled closer, her hand leaving Garrus’ to wrap around his waist. “Just no more nightmares, I hope.”

“I’m still right here if there are.” Garrus’ arms settled more snugly around her, protective and secure.

Jane closed her eyes. She counted the seconds that ticked by and the slow, gentle rhythm of Garrus’ heart. She thought about their history together, all the things that they’d been through, and the luck she must have come by to be with him here, now. She felt sleep coming to her more easily than it had in a long time, and she let it take her without a worry for what lay in her dreams.

After all, Garrus was here with her.

**Author's Note:**

> A request from @gottahaveformasseffect on tumblr.
> 
> Check out my tumblr!
> 
> Main: http://saiikavon.tumblr.com/  
> Writing blog: http://saiikasnotebook.tumblr.com/


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